Thursday, February 21, 2008

It's never a huge surprise that when a new and innovative way comes around to make money online, eventually there will be a glut of unscrupulous people abusing the privilege. Essentially, this is what has happened on Craigslist, where having offered the vehicle by which people like you and I could advertise our offers to HUGE numbers of eyeballs for free...a huge influx of spammers has ruined the proverbial party by posting so often their fingers are probably bleeding from the effort.

And of course, to combat this, Craigslist has come up with a somewhat unique and annoyingly inconsistent way of reigning in the rotten apples. It is called "ghosting", and is the process by which your ad appears to have been accepted by the system, looks "live" within your admin account..yet, is nowhere to be found in the real time results. Can be a very frustrating experience without any question, and has led many craigslist posting fanatics to jump ship and find greener pastures to pick.

Here is a very easy way for you to avoid the "ghost" if you are getting it..:-) Now, I've written extensively about this in other places, and do only have limited space here, but the simplest thing you can do if your ads are being ghosted is this: Simply host your images somewhere that you see lots of other ads using for theirs. Not your own domain obviously...a public image repository is good for example. Link your CL ad to that image rather than pointing to your own domain. Then..using your image editing software, simply overlay your URL text into the image itself, thus negating the need for a live link, one of the prime triggers for Casper and friends to come by and say Boo!

Then...and this is a very well tested strategy by both myself and others, simply use a dial up connection when making your posts. One very well accepted cause of ghosting is multiple posts from the same IP - and simply logging in with a dial up modem, off and then on again for each set of new posts is a very simple, and effective way of negating that issue for me, and many others as well.

Of course there is more - but if you do the above, you WILL see your ghosting rates dropping fast, meaning more live ads, and more commissions for you! Good luck..:-)